Maybe my Google-fu is shoddy but I couldn’t find out anything about it. It seems as though someone spent some coin for a pretty weak turnout. Does anyone know what this is and what’s it’s purpose is? And does the spinning help with stabilization? Link below.
Catherine wheel? They are just for fun, like any fireworks.
Pretty cool. I’ve never seen anything like that before.
I wonder how high it went.
I’ve seen Fourth-of-July fireworks like that, although never that large. You can buy Catherine wheels about the size of the palm of your hand, that will fly 10 or 20 feet into the air. The smaller ones make more light, and less smoke.
How confident are we that this video is real and not faked? Its one of the issues with living in the times that we do, that I have to ask this question of something that doesn’t quite look right or make sense.
Could be fake but why? Just a cool firework contraption built on a huge scale. Doesn’t serve a purpose, just looks like some entertainment at a local festival or something.
Here’s a ton more of various sizes.
The interesting thing about it is the fact that it’s inherently so stable. Unless they just got lucky, it seemed to go pretty much straight up until it ran out of fuel.
In my firework vernacular, a Catherine Wheel is secured by a pin in the center and rotates in place. It does not fly.
ETA: Wikipedia agrees
@Hampshire 's link appears to be calling it a “girandola”, though I believe that can mean the same as pinwheel in Italian
THanks for this. My skeptism has been assuaged and I am comfortable in the veracity of the video based on your link…
Thanks for providing this, I’m fascinated and actually pretty pleased that such things are real and not just figments of someones imagination.
Yes, the spin helps keep it stable, kind of like the rifling on a gun barrel.
I was not expecting a parachute; KUDOS!
The video itself looks real enough to me, but the uploader needs castigation for the racist joke in the title. I gave the video a dislike for that reason.
What’s it’s purpose? Dude, just look at it! It’s friggen’ awesome! What more “purpose” does it need?
I WANT ONE!!!
How is this “unclear”, Discourse? You are not my editor. Eat donkey dick.
Hey, I’m with you, being awesome is enough. It just occurred to me it might be a prototype for something, I don’t, bigger? It’s just a weird video ( in my mind anyway) in that it’s so fantastically cool and there’s almost no one there.
But I’m also fine with it being built by a lone kook in a field somewhere.
It’s not a lone kook - there’s a whole team of about two dozen people setting it up. And there’s “almost no one there” where “there” is the launch platform. We’re just seeing the team that’s setting it up, being filmed from the observation area, which is some distance away, presumably for safety reasons.
If you look at the 0:48 mark, you can see a couple of umbrellas or awnings and a couple of other people around the camera. There’s quite possibly a large crowd of onlookers to the sides and behind the camera. From the ambient audio, it certainly sounds like a number of kids and other people are around the camera, as well as a voice on a loudspeaker, as if someone is addressing a crowd that’s so large they need a PA system to make themselves heard.
I’ll bet a smaller version is a common toy in this locale. It’s not a stretch to imagine a few locals with the available resources to scale it up just to see what happens. They obviously carefully thought out the execution (going as far as having color-coded shirts for the launch team), but the basic engineering was probably allready in the toy that inspired it.
It’s the Thai Rocket Festival.